Oldest Material On Earth Discovered (bbc.com) 42
fahrbot-bot shares a report from the BBC: Scientists analyzing a meteorite have discovered the oldest material known to exist on Earth. They found dust grains within the space rock -- which fell to Earth in the 1960s -- that are as much as 7.5 billion years old. The oldest of the dust grains were formed in stars that roared to life long before our Solar System was born. A team of researchers has described the result in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team from the U.S. and Switzerland analyzed 40 pre-solar grains contained in a portion of the Murchison meteorite, that fell in Australia in 1969. Based on how many cosmic rays had interacted with the grains, most had to be 4.6-4.9 billion years old. For comparison, the Sun is 4.6 billion years old and the Earth is 4.5 billion. However, the oldest yielded a date of around 7.5 billion years old. Previously, the oldest pre-solar grain dated with neon isotopes was around 5.5 billion years old.
The team from the U.S. and Switzerland analyzed 40 pre-solar grains contained in a portion of the Murchison meteorite, that fell in Australia in 1969. Based on how many cosmic rays had interacted with the grains, most had to be 4.6-4.9 billion years old. For comparison, the Sun is 4.6 billion years old and the Earth is 4.5 billion. However, the oldest yielded a date of around 7.5 billion years old. Previously, the oldest pre-solar grain dated with neon isotopes was around 5.5 billion years old.
Re:The pyramids (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The pyramids (Score:4, Funny)
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The $10,000 pyramid [wikipedia.org].
Is that in today's US dollars or Egyptian Fourth Dynasty Grain-Bank dollars? 'Cause it's way different.
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Which of them? The Mesoamerican [wikipedia.org]? The East Asian [wikipedia.org]? The North American [wikipedia.org]? The African [wikipedia.org]? Those in Sudan or those in Egypt? And of those in Egypt? 3th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]? 5th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]? 6th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]? 13th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]? 18th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]?
You'd think somebody who can name all of those would just provide the answer, but noooooo.... we all have to see how "smart" they are.
Let me answer in kind: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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They could tell us which of the pyramids are 18,000 years old if such exist.
It all depends on how you define "pyramid", e.g. is it made of blocks of cut stone?
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Which of them? The Mesoamerican [wikipedia.org]? The East Asian [wikipedia.org]? The North American [wikipedia.org]? The African [wikipedia.org]? Those in Sudan or those in Egypt? And of those in Egypt? 3th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]? 5th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]? 6th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]? 13th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]? 18th Dynasty [wikipedia.org]?
Damn, those aliens were busy.
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original /. head wear (Score:3, Funny)
I've had the same tin foil pyramid hat for the past 20 years.
H! (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I know all hydrogen atoms around and within us have been created in the Big Bang.
Also, as the Moby song goes, we are all made of star(s) (matter)...
https://www.livescience.com/32... [livescience.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:H! (Score:5, Informative)
Not all, some hydrogen atoms are generated form cosmic rays.
https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/... [nasa.gov]
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Umm... no.
Cosmic rays *are* hydrogen (or occasionally heavier nuclei). It's not like there's some magic "cosmic ray stuff" that turns into hydrogen when it hits something. Cosmic rays are normal matter that have somehow been accelerated to close to light speed.
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That is a good point, I'd misremembered them as high energy photons. Thank you for the correction. They'are also generated from more recent phenomenon rather than purely from the Big Bang.
Re: H! (Score:2)
Re:H! (Score:4, Informative)
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LynnwoodRooster pointed out:
Moby? It's way older than that [youtube.com]. Moby was 4 when CSN was singing about us being stardust, being golden...
Yep. And they didn't even write Woodstock. Joni Mitchell did that. CSN&Y had the hit, but it was Steve Stills's Laurel Canyon neighbor who wrote it.
And I can't help but note that the actual line is, "We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion-year-old carbon ..." and that's factually incorrect. (The carbon of which all organic life is composed is WAY older than that. In fact, some of it is a good deal less than a half-billion years younger than our Universe itself.)
Of cou
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As far as I know all hydrogen atoms around and within us have been created in the Big Bang
Not quite, as the atoms on earth have broken apart and reformed many times, since first forming 380,000 years after the BB.
I think you mean the "hydrogen nuclei", but they are just protons, the basis of all atoms (along with neutrons and electrons), not just hydrogen.
Some Helium and Lithium also... (Score:2)
...were created at that time [physicsworld.com].
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As far as I know all hydrogen atoms around and within us have been created in the Big Bang.
Also, as the Moby song goes, we are all made of star(s) (matter)...
https://www.livescience.com/32... [livescience.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
You do have proton emissions in some radioactive decay processes.
And if you want to be really pedantic - no elements were made in the big bang itself. The energy levels were too high for atoms to exist. [quora.com]
Atoms (Score:4, Interesting)
At a guess there would be quite a mix from primordial H to more recent Fe.
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Older (Score:3)
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Is there some reason to assume our solar system was seeded by only one supernova? I mean, if we're starting from the model's estimate, that implies a 1.5 billion year gap between the production of the uranium and the formation of the solar system. That's roughly 6 galactic years, plenty of time for a great deal of mixing from gas clouds on different galactic orbits.
Oh thank God (Score:1, Funny)
How they estimated the age of the dust? (Score:5, Informative)
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And butsts of cosmic radiation might "age" the crystals? Then the process sounds vulnerable to confusion, if the particular rock passed a cosmic event such as a supernova. Doesn't extrapolating a consistent environment for billions of years seem a bit error prone?
Re: How they estimated the age of the dust? (Score:5, Insightful)
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My thoughts exactly.
FTA: Some of these (cosmic) rays interact with the matter they encounter and form new elements. The longer they are exposed, the more of these elements form. The researchers used a particular form (isotope) of the element neon - Ne-21 - to date the grains.
"I compare this with putting out a bucket in a rainstorm. Assuming the rainfall is constant, the amount of water that accumulates in the bucket tells you how long it was exposed," said Dr Heck.
It's not that the researchers couldn't be correct in their dating assumptions. They very well could, but if there is an acceptable +/- margin for error extrapolated over billions of years, it wouldn't take much inconsistency to skew the results.
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When the nearby cosmic radiation is a high intensity overwhelming event, such as a supernova, that might generate nearly _all_ of the neon nuclei in a single nearby supernova. I'll admit in advance that I'm not an expert in cosmological chemical history. But when we measure the accumulated results of _any_ very slow process that might also include catastrophic events, we have to be very careful about our conclusions.
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Submitters - pay attention to this good summary. Copy'n'paste of the first two paragraphs of a popular press article is almost never a good summary.
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And yet somehow they're still capable of considerably more intelligent observations than you...
Oldest Material On Earth Discovered... (Score:3, Funny)
...Michael McIntyre is said to be interested in purchasing it for his next TV series.
Zoomers have difficulty ... (Score:1)
We can guess (Score:1)
Stupidity. Some of the posts here demonstrate, also, how common it is (the pyramids are 12kyr old?)